NextWar now available in more regions; cheaper

With the new updates to XNA and Xbox Live Community Indie Games, games are now available for sale in Germany, Japan, Singapore and Sweden. I've updated NextWar so that it can now be sold in these regions. So if you live in these regions, and are itching to play Tower Defence on your Xbox 360, check out NextWar!

Also, with the introduction of the new pricepoints (80MSP, 240MSP and 400MSP, corresponding to $1, $3, and $5 respectively), I've decided to drop the price of NextWar to 80MSP. So if you were holding off buying NextWar or didn't think it was worth 200MSP, you might want to reconsider! NextWar is now in the Xbox Live version of the $1 bargain bin. :)

NextWar: The Quest for Earth official site

Xbox Live Marketplace link

How well did NextWar really do?

Well, it's been 3 months since the release of NextWar: The Quest for Earth over Xbox Live Community Games. How well did it really do?

I'll let the graphs speak for themselves first:



The sales graph curved pretty much exactly how I expected it: an exponential decrease immediately after release, then dropping off a cliff after the game fell off the New Releases/Most Popular lists. Once that happened, sales trickled down to single digits per day.

Overall statistics:

Downloads to date: 14572
Sales to date: 2703
Conversion Rate: 18.55%
Total revenue: US$4578.88

It did reasonably well compared to many other Community Games - but the overall conclusion is "don't quit your day job". Making a game and selling it on Community Games can be fun as a hobby, but it's not viable as a full-time job. This is essentially echoed by many other developers who have released games on XBLCG. Nevertheless, despite only being a minor success, the amount of money generated by NextWar's sales (however small) is still nice for something that I put together in my free time.

The Future
So what lies ahead for Micron Game Studios and the future of my hobbyist game development?

Well, I'm doing this for fun and not for the money, so I think I'll be making another game regardless of how I think NextWar did in terms of sales.

There are a few viable game designs I'm batting around right now, so stay tuned for more stuff coming out of Micron Game Studios in the coming months!